The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense

Suzette Haden Elgin

EXCERPT: From pp. 14-19
in the new revised and updated edition of The
Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, just out from Fall River
Press [a Barnes
& Noble imprint].

There
are three major reasons why learning verbal self-defense can be the
most
important step you take in your life. Let’s look at them one
at a time.

The
Link Between Verbal Violence
and Physical Violence

The
reason we don’t have enough money to do the things we want
and need to
do is
that we spend so much of our money dealing with physical violence and
its
consequences. We spend enormous sums on law enforcement, on jails and
prisons,
on the legal system and the courts, on security, on insurance, on
preventing
and dealing with domestic violence, on the ininsured medical costs of
violent
criminals and their victims. We all know that those costs keep growing,
and how
out of control they are.

But the “words can’t hurt you” idea
keeps us from noticing the obvious: that almost all physical violence
starts as
verbal violence–as hostile language. Sane people
don’t just walk up to
other
people and start hitting. First there is an exchange of hostile words;
then the
physical violence starts. Even in cases where someone walks into their
school
or church or workplace and starts shooting, there is almost always a
history of
hostile language leadiing up to that final tragic event.

Once violence becomes physical, we
need professionals to deal with it–police officers and
emergency
personnel and
medical experts; it’s out of our hands. But while the
violence is still
“only
words,” every person who speaks a language can learn how to
deal with
it and
how to keep it from escalating into physical violence. To get a handle
on
physical violence and stop wasting our resources on it, we need to
tackle it
where it starts, while it’s still hostile language. That
means learning
verbal
self-defense. It means learning how to establish and maintain a
language
environment in which hostile language is very rare; it means learning
how to
deal with hostile language effectively and efficiently when it truly
cannot be
avoided.

The
Link Between Language and
Health

Sometimes
things that seem obvious and self-evident–like the flatness
of the
Earth when
you look at it as you’re driving through
Illinois–are only illlusions.
Sometimes we aren’t able to see that, because we
don’t have the right
technology for working with the data. The link between language and
health is
like that. Only recently have we been able to get a good, clear look at
that
link and begin to understand what it means.

We used to have to study medical
histories with paper and pen and calculator, and that gave us one
picture–one
very limited picture–of what was going on. Today, the
powerful
computers that
can show us hundreds of thousands of medical histories over the course
of
decades give us a very different
picture: they show us that over time, hostile language maims and kills
just
like sticks and stones and knives and guns maim and kill. We
couldn’t
see that
before, because we didn’t have enough data. Now we can see
it, and the
data
tell us that hostile language is perhaps the most dangerous of all
“risk
factors.” More dangerous than obesity, more dangerous than
smoking,
more
dangerous than high cholesterol, more dangerous than all those things
we put so
much effort into avoiding. The information that appears when you look
at enough
medical data to see long-term patterns tells us unambiguously that
people who
are chronically exposed to hostile language get sick more often, are
injured
more often, take longer to recover from illness and injury, and die
younger.

And there’s more, thanks to those
same powerful computers. We now know that hostile language
isn’t
dangerous just
to those who are its target. It’s also dangerous to the
person dishing
it out,
and it’s dangerous to innocent bystanders who can’t
avoid it. That
changes
things dramatically. That means that it’s just as important
for verbal
abusers
to learn how to communicate without hostile language as it is for
verbal
targets to learn how to defend themselves against their attackers.
Hostile
language is toxic; to keep it out of your life, you need to learn
verbal
self-defense.

The
Link Between Language and
Success in Today’s World

There
was a time when most people got jobs and stayed in them for many years;
there
was a time when most people worked for one company, maybe two, until
they
retired. Individuals might move up through the ranks over time, but the
company
was like family; everybody knew everybody else.

In those days there was plenty of
time for people to get used to one another at work. When new people
were hired,
somebody would fill them in. Like this:

“Don’t
pay any attention to the things Jack says; he’s really

a
nice guy, and he doesn’t mean to sound like such a
jerk.”“Just
ignore Amanda when she starts mouthing off, she

doesn’t
mean any of it.”

“Don’t
let the way Henderson talks fool you–he sounds stupid,

but
he’s really one of the smartest guys in the
company.”

As long as you showed up every
day
for work and did your best, you could assume that you’d get
ahead, even
if your
communication skills were poor.

That has now changed
dramatically.
Now people change jobs, even change their whole careers, at a
moment’s
notice.
Within a single job, they move from project to project, and from team
to team.
To succeed today you need to be able to make a good impression
immediately,
establish instant rapport, and communicate successfully with people
you’ve only
just met. The luxury of lead time for gradually adjusting to others in
your
workplace has disappeared. Poor communication skills today are a
serious
barrier to success.

You may feel that this doesn’t
matter to you personally. You may already have succeeded in your chosen
field;
you may already have climbed high enough on the ladder. But if you have
children and/or grandchildren, I assure you that it still does matter.
If you
want a tranquil retirement, free of children and grandchildren
desperate for
your help because they can’t earn their own livings in
today’s world,
you need
to learn verbal self-defense so that you can make sure their language skills are topnotch.

Developing your verbal self-defense
skills is in your own best interest, and it will repay your investment
of
learning time and energy many times over. To learn verbal self-defense,
you
need only your fluency in your native language, your common
sense–and
this
book. The book will teach you the following things:

1. How to recognize patterns of verbal
abuse in your own speech,

so that you can stop
using them
2. How to recognize verbal target patterns
in your own language

behavior, so that you
can stop using them
3. How to recognize patterns of verbal
abuse in the language behavior of others, so
that you will be aware of them and know where the sources
of contamination in your own language environment are
4. How to use a set of verbal self-defense
techniques that will let you either defuse verbal
attacks in advance and avoid hostility, or respond to them effectively
when the confrontation cannot be avoided
5. How to use patterns of language that
will improve the way others perceive you when
that perception is based on your language behavior
6. How to eliminate patterns of language
behavior that detract from the perception
others have of you
7. How to interact verbally and
nonverbally with others in such

a way that your
communication is more efficient and more

satisfactory

It’s not true that these
accomplishments are limited to people with advanced degrees in
communication,
language arts, and linguistics, or to people “born with a
silver tongue
in
their mouths.” You are equipped to do all these things, no
matter what
your present
level of expertise may be, simply because you are a native speaker of
your
language.